Just 32 more days to get World Cup bird flu

I do not like to criticise my own newspaper, but I really feel we are missing the mood of the nation by failing to provide a graphic on every page counting down to the World Cup finals. Still, if the Guardian insists on being all hoity-toity about it, they should know I am the man they cannot gag. Thirty-two days to go. There, I said it.

Mind you, while Farringdon Road remains not yet entirely engaged in the prospect of the forthcoming hostilities, there seems little danger of television missing the opportunity to foment the current mild World Cup influenza into full-blown World Cup fever. England - Going All The Way (surely there is a question mark missing there somewhere), on BBC2 last night, the first in a series of six World Cup Stories, presages, I feel fairly confident in saying, a welter of World Cup programming over the next 32 days (Yes. Just 32 days to go!). We will probably see amended repeats of those collections of World Cup moments of the past, which will be particularly galling for those of us who appeared on them as "experts" and neglected to negotiate repeat fees. That aside, I am a sucker for the old World Cup stuff; Pele, Maradona, Wembley 1966, Mexico '70, bring it all on.

Mostly, of course, these archive programmes are little more than a procession of familiar clips linked by wannabe presenters, former footballers plucked from the after-dinner circuit and writers from the posh papers desperate to supplement their meagre fees, which is why World Cup Stories last night was an unalloyed delight. Here, for once, was a clips show assembled with intelligence, wit and a real care for the business of story-telling.

It focused on the years from 1950 to 1990, recounting the familiar saga of how England was shaken out of its arrogance and insularity by the Hungarians at Wembley in 1953, and failure in the World Cups of '54 and '58, culminating in the appointment of the technocrat Alf Ramsey and triumph in the 1966 competition. The misfortunes of 1970 and the Poland qualifier in 1973 were catalogued, while the years that followed, before Bobby Robson's appointment, were given mercifully short shrift, being dubbed The Wilderness Years. It benefited from having Bobby Charlton and Gordon Banks relive past World Cups rather than Lisa Rogers and Paul Tonkinson and also featured unexpected pleasures, like Jack Charlton's wickedly accurate impersonation of Ramsey.

Jack told how Alf punctured his pride and joy at his unexpected selection for England. "I asked him 'Why me?' and he said 'Well, Jack, hay 'ave a pattern of play in may mind, an' hay pick the happropriate players to fit into that pattern. Hay don't always necessarily pick the best players [a pause] Jack'."

Jack heard about his selection after an FA Cup replay between Leeds and Manchester United, so he went into the United dressing room to tell his brother Bobby who, by his own admission, gave him grudging, unsmiling congratulations. Pat Crerand was even more curmudgeonly. "Yes, we're all very pleased for you Jack," he said, "Now fuck off out of the dressing room."

Little chance, then, of footballers in Sir Alf's era becoming the kind of arrogant, boastful, overbearing sportsmen the regulars on Grumpy Old Men were moaning about last week. However, as their complaints were mostly illustrated with footage of Lennox Lewis declaring he was the best heavyweight boxer in the world, they were on fairly dodgy ground. That is not boasting, boys, it is survival. Any boxer that goes into the ring not believing he is the best is in what I believe is popularly referred to these days as a bad place.

The grumpsters struck more of a chord with their distaste for all the crying we have been seeing on TV programmes lately. Gazza may have started it, but now it pervades every reality show. As Rick Wakeman said, there has to be a more solid reason than losing a contest or suffering a professional disappointment to burst into public tears: "Being impaled upon a railing would be a good example."

Arthur Smith agreed, and nominated being freshly "kicked in the knackers" or the discovery that some stranger has had sex with your mum. He also urged footballers to return to the handshake as acknowledgment of a goal, rather than piling on top of each other like participants in "a male gay orgy".

Grumpy Old Men is funny, but you do wonder sometimes what they have got to be grumpy about. Here they are, in comfortable middle age, being handsomely rewarded for observations that would just about pass muster on the stand-up circuit. And they do not have to haul their asses up and down the country to deliver them. I mean, goodness me, they probably even get bloody repeat fees.